Welcome DFAers!
For those of you coming over from the Democracy for America Grassroots All-Star House Vote contest, let me introduce myself and my race.
I am running for Congress because I am as tired with traditional politics as the rest of you. I was a Dean supporter because he was different – he invited everyone to the table, depended on low-dollar donors and was more interested in broad and meaningful involvement and feedback than in message and top down control.
I believed in him, because I was tired with pay to play, money dominated politics that has made cynics of us all, and he offered a different type of campaign. He gave the power and control to us, trusted and depended on us. He did not create the campaign, the campaign happened to him, and he allowed it to – in that he was radically different, a campaign that demonstrated participatory democracy. This is the future of politics.
Unfortunately, the end of his campaign was the end of this revolution in political campaigns. Others have used some of his tools, but none have taken this idea of involvement and distributed campaigning to the next level – no one has advanced this new type of politics on a national level.
My campaign is my contribution to trying to move this forward. I am letting anyone schedule my time, first come first served – you are my campaign scheduler. I am limiting my campaign contributions to $100. I am putting my account ledger and meeting details online in real time. I am blogging and podcasting personally. I am empowering Community Captains to walk and call their precincts and run mini-campaigns at their own discretion, with an online, centralized database. I am writing extensive and powerful software to enable all of this, and giving away the source code to anyone for free. Mine is the first Open Source campaign, and if you want to be involved, I invite you to join me. Let us fix politics, let us do it together. Join the conversation.
To see the new website that is incorporating this functionality, go to the Beta site. You can get the source code for this entire website here.
Also, for those of you not familiar, you can vote on the DFA website for them to endorse me here : http://tools.democracyforamerica.com/housevote/
I am running for Congress because I am as tired with traditional politics as the rest of you. I was a Dean supporter because he was different – he invited everyone to the table, depended on low-dollar donors and was more interested in broad and meaningful involvement and feedback than in message and top down control.
I believed in him, because I was tired with pay to play, money dominated politics that has made cynics of us all, and he offered a different type of campaign. He gave the power and control to us, trusted and depended on us. He did not create the campaign, the campaign happened to him, and he allowed it to – in that he was radically different, a campaign that demonstrated participatory democracy. This is the future of politics.
Unfortunately, the end of his campaign was the end of this revolution in political campaigns. Others have used some of his tools, but none have taken this idea of involvement and distributed campaigning to the next level – no one has advanced this new type of politics on a national level.
My campaign is my contribution to trying to move this forward. I am letting anyone schedule my time, first come first served – you are my campaign scheduler. I am limiting my campaign contributions to $100. I am putting my account ledger and meeting details online in real time. I am blogging and podcasting personally. I am empowering Community Captains to walk and call their precincts and run mini-campaigns at their own discretion, with an online, centralized database. I am writing extensive and powerful software to enable all of this, and giving away the source code to anyone for free. Mine is the first Open Source campaign, and if you want to be involved, I invite you to join me. Let us fix politics, let us do it together. Join the conversation.
To see the new website that is incorporating this functionality, go to the Beta site. You can get the source code for this entire website here.
Also, for those of you not familiar, you can vote on the DFA website for them to endorse me here : http://tools.democracyforamerica.com/housevote/